You would think they would be as they have mastered the toolkit of English grammar, but many successful writers are not grammar whizzes, and many grammar pros are not all that great at the actual craft of engaging writing.
Why?
Because grammar and writing are two different skills.
Who are these “master grammarians”? Give us some examples so we can evaluate their writing skills. If the people you’re talking about are professors of linguistics who have contributed deep and important insights to the field of linguistics, there’s no more reason for them to be great writers than for brilliant mathematicians to be good at mental arithmetic. Being a good expository writer is an important skill, but it has no necessary connection to knowing a great deal about linguistic theory or about the grammar of many languages.
Few successful writers are bad with grammar, especially since everyone internalizes nearly all the rules of grammar before they write. Not everyone can articulate what they are, but anyone who reads at all doesn’t break them. Writers may have problems with usage (though that’s unlikely – you do have a copyeditor to fix that), but I’d love to see some example of bad grammar (other than deliberately bad grammar for effect) in any published work.
Going beyond that, ultrafilter is right – they’re different skills and being able to identify a particular verb tense has no application in writing (other than the internal knowledge that a certain form of a verb is wrong for what you want to do).
And people who can sight read music should be the greatest musicians.
Every answer in this thread will be some variation on “the two things have no connection whatsoever”.
For that matter, all great musicians should be great composers.
Being a journalist doesn’t make you a poet. Being a poet doesn’t make you a novelist. Being a novelist doesn’t make you a technical writer, etc.
It’s the difference between being a great referee and a great player.
When I took Comp and Rhetoric as a freshman in college, my instructor had us write a five-paragraph essay wherein we followed every single applicable rule to the letter. The essays were unreadable. This exercise was intended to teach us that we needed to know the rules in order to write, but we had to know when to break them in order to write well.
Because stunning grammar, in and of itself, isn’t really too captivating.
Point you make, I don’t know, at, like.
Says you.
I’m also wondering who else is a ‘master grammarian’, aside from scholarly linguists?
There’s that Strunk and White guy, I guess. But it’s true he couldn’t tell a story worth remembering. Guy couldn’t narrate his way out of a paper bag.
Master grammarian? I can tell that she was born… Hungarian!
Nicely done, nailed it.
As Roald Dahl pointed out in his book Going Solo, anyone can learn to write well, but good writers are born with a talent for it. Dahl himself never thought about being a professional writer until C.S. Forresster was commissioned to write a piece about fighter pilots in World War II and asked Dahl to write his notes about his personal experience in England’s Royal Air Force. Dahl did so, and Forrester sold the story to the Saturday Evening Post for $1,000.
Dahl’s first thought was “It can’t be this easy.” But it was (if your name happened to be Roald Dahl).